Gasping For Air
by Deathofme
Summary: She wants to kiss him. For her, he's willing to take off the mask.


**A/N  
**Short fic for nolikereally who requested this at the tdkr_kink meme.

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**Gasping For Air**

Ra's al Ghul is a man who is used to getting his own way and is one blessed with the conviction that he is always right. The temple he's created and the societies he's felled only speak as fervent testimonies to his justice.

But Talia understands something about men as she has seen them at their most base and desperate. They are all the same. Cruel because they are afraid. So when he tells her that her protector is no man but a beast, she sees this as a compliment.

What the mighty Ra's al Ghul doesn't understand is that she is the one who is truly the protector. The nights she spends curled up in Bane's arms because they need each other to chase away the nightmares of the pit, he is the one squeezing her tightly because he needs something to hold onto in this world. Otherwise...he would be lost with only his pain. Sharp and constant.

When Ra's al Ghul banishes her old friend from the League of Shadows he does it without honour because he is afraid. Bane destroys almost an entire wing of the temple when he's jumped on by dozens of men hoping to beat him and drive him out into the darkness. Wild, feral and enraged. Talia wants to tell her father his home is destroyed because Bane was brought back to the pit, to the time when hundreds of men clawed at him and he was afraid. That was the cruelest way to cast him out. But men lie with their backs broken or their skulls crushed in around Ra's al Ghul's feet and instead he only feels vindicated in his hatred.

She finds Bane later sitting in a cave at the foot of the mountain. She did not need to look anywhere else...she knows the mind of a scared, hurt animal.

He looks at her with lost, wild eyes, at first only seeing a figure in the darkness, and she finds herself on her back, his crushing hands pinning her to the ground ready to snap her neck...until he realizes who she is and quickly lets her up, turning away from her in shame. Talia curls up beside him that night lying on the cold rock and she is brought back to the only happiness that could have been found in the pit.

"You must go back to your father...he is your family."

Talia watches the dawn creep its way to the mountain, a cold, steel blue. "I think we both know how cheap blood is, old friend. It escapes the weak so easily..."

He frowns at her, she can see it in the way his eyes crinkle. "Your father is the man you need in your life."

"I don't need men...men are weak...men are cruel, and always afraid." Her fingers run along the tubes of his mask, trying to remember the face of her old protector in her skin because she cannot recall it in her mind. He watches her movements with shame and desire, shamed for the desire. She already knows what the metal tastes like, bitter from the small wisps of the venom that escapes through the vents, and numbing. She had tried kissing him when he was asleep but could only brush her lips against the mask.

"Do you trust me?" she asks him, her fingers hooking underneath his mask. She feels his chest staccato because he is afraid. Because he is afraid of the pain that he lives with everyday which is only just kept at bay, the pain that tears through his entire body and makes every breath, every step a fight. Because he is afraid that this is not what she wants, but he is never afraid of trusting her too much and this is how she knows he is better than a man. Her eyes locked with his, she undoes the clasps of the maskHe breathes in deeply, his barrel-like chest swelling, and closes his eyes briefly. She pulls the mask upwards and away from his face and his entire body constricts and goes rigid with an agony he will never be able to tell her. She sees the face of her protector then, never like her feeble memories...scarred, the flesh torn in old rents that have healed over as ugly grooves and cuts tracks through his mouth, his lips chapped and raw from the metal grate of the mask, he looks wild and frightening - and it is perfect.

She presses her lips hungrily against his own, finally able to feel him against her as she always wanted, rubbing her nose and face against the mars on his skin, the flesh that won't knit back, and it is rough and desperate. She feels his chest hitch underneath her as his body cries out for the venom, but she feels his arms tighten around her, crushing her to him and his mouth greedily swallow her sweetness, her breath, her poison as no amount of the chemicals will ever bring him out of the pit that had caged them for so long.

Ra's al Ghul, her father, was so right but he would never know.


End file.
